How Feasible are Passive Network Attacks on 5G Networks and Beyond? A Survey

Atmane Ayoub Mansour Bahar; Andrés Alayón Glazunov; Romaric Duvignau

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2512.20622

How Feasible are Passive Network Attacks on 5G Networks and Beyond? A Survey

Atmane Ayoub Mansour Bahar·Andrés Alayón Glazunov·Romaric Duvignau

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Privacy concerns around 5G, the latest generation of mobile networks, are growing, with fears that its deployment may increase exposure to privacy risks. This perception is largely driven by the use of denser deployments of small antenna systems, which enable highly accurate data collection at higher speeds and closer proximity to mobile users. At the same time, 5G's unique radio communication features can make the reproduction of known network attacks more challenging. In particular, passive network attacks, which do not involve direct interaction with the target network and are therefore nearly impossible to detect, remain a pressing concern. Such attacks can reveal sensitive information about users, their devices, and active applications, which may then be exploited through known vulnerabilities or spear-phishing schemes. This survey examines the feasibility of passive network attacks in 5G and beyond (B5G/6G) networks, with emphasis on two major categories: information extraction (system identification, website and application fingerprinting) and geolocation (user identification and position tracking). These attacks are well documented and reproducible in existing wireless and mobile systems, including short-range networks (IEEE 802.11) and, to a lesser extent, LTE. Current evidence suggests that while such attacks remain theoretically possible in 5G, their practical execution is significantly constrained by directional beamforming, high-frequency propagation characteristics, and encryption mechanisms. For B5G and early 6G networks, the lack of public tools and high hardware cost currently renders these attacks infeasible in practice, which highlights a critical gap in our understanding of future network threat models.

Explore related subjects

cs.NI cs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Atmane Ayoub Mansour Bahar, Andrés Alayón Glazunov, Romaric Duvignau. 2025-11-21. How Feasible are Passive Network Attacks on 5G Networks and Beyond? A Survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20622

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It

Channel State Information (CSI) has become a widely used wireless channel sensing modality for applications such as indoor localization, activity recognition, and respiration monitoring. Because collecting labeled data under every target condition is impractical, training CSI-based models often relies on simulated data produced by adding noise or perturbations to recorded channel estimates, most commonly additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This practice assumes that the receiver chain between the antenna and the channel estimator is linear and gain-invariant. We test this assumption empirically using RF jamming as a controlled perturbation on 6 commodity receivers across 2 indoor environments. The assumption does not hold. Automatic gain control compresses the channel estimate multiplicatively before digitization, producing amplitude distributions that no additive noise variance can reproduce. To close the resulting fidelity gap, we propose M_QTC, a measurement-calibrated model that learns the per-subcarrier distribution transformation through quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based cross-subcarrier reordering. M_QTC reduces amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the aggregate fidelity gap across four complementary dimensions. The improvement transfers directly to downstream tasks, where 5 classifiers from different families trained on M_QTC-simulated data recover 93% of real-data jamming detection performance, while AWGN-trained classifiers remain near random decision.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

BALANCE: Hybrid Autoregressive-Speculative LLM Inference at the Network Edge

Edge inference is a promising paradigm to provide large language model (LLM) inference services in next-generation mobile networks. LLM inference mainly relies on two approaches: Autoregressive decoding (AD) generates output tokens sequentially, resulting in long latency; Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by using a small language model (SLM) to generate multiple draft tokens for LLM verification, but incurs extra memory costs. Due to this latency-memory tradeoff, neither approach alone can efficiently serve users with heterogeneous demands under limited edge computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid autoregressive-speculative inference (BALANCE) framework for edge LLM inference. In BALANCE, an edge server hosts both an SLM and an LLM, admits users, assigns each admitted user to the AD or SD mode, and performs the two modes simultaneously. To maximize the number of served users, we formulate a task throughput maximization problem to jointly determine user admission and computing resource allocation between AD and SD under user latency requirements and server memory constraints. Since the problem is NP-hard, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that transforms the original problem into two sub-problems and obtains a sub-optimal solution with a constant approximation guarantee. Experiments demonstrate that BALANCE consistently outperforms conventional AD and SD and significantly improves task throughput.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Zero-Knowledge Remote Adversarial Attack against Wi-Fi-based Human Activity Recognition for Privacy Protection

The growing capability of Wi-Fi devices to identify human activities using channel state information (CSI) raises privacy concerns. To counter this threat, we propose GRAW, an adversary system, acting as a privacy defender, that degrades the human activity recognition (HAR) system at the user device by perturbing the router's signals that the device uses to estimate CSI. GRAW employs generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) to construct perturbation signals, and thereby eliminates the need for any information on the target HAR systems and their inputs (i.e., zero-knowledge operation). We evaluate GRAW against seven representative HAR models, using datasets collected in five environments, including our own dataset. We observe that GRAW is the only remote attack scheme that degrades every tested HAR model to a random-selection level. At the same perturbation level, GRAW achieves an attack success ratio up to 76.7% higher than comparison methods, while maintaining over 99% packet success rate on regular Wi-Fi communication. We demonstrate the feasibility of GRAW through real-time, over-the-air experiments with software-defined radios.

cs.NI↗